THE YACHT CLUB: Interview with Margate's retro and vintage guru James Wright
“…he used to have a hangar filled with more than 100,000 kilos of vintage clothing near Stansted Airport”
All Images by ‘cene Magazine
Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy has certainly highlighted to a new audience that the world of fast fashion and hyper-consumerism is killing the planet.
While many people have shouted it from the rooftops for years, its entry into the consciousness of the masses might help just bring a new emphasis to the fight against it. The manufacturing of clothes, many of which never see the light of day before they are disposed of, was a stark reminder of the price of fashion.
The latest vintage, retro and thrift movement has been under way for some time, with platforms such as Vinted and Depop helping fuel the popularity of buying quality preloved items. But in reality it all started a long time ago.
The Yacht Club Vintage (@theyachtclubvintage) on Westwood Business Park in Margate is owned by James Wright, who has run both retail and wholesale vintage clothes businesses since the 90s.
“I was wholesaling to Urban Outfitters 20 years ago,” says James. “And I’ve just been unpacking some of the stuff that I was selling to them back then. They had 50 shops back then and would put a 1,000-unit order in just to service all their stores.”
The Yacht Club is a mixture of wholesale and retail, with some 25 rails of clothing starting out at just £1 and progressing through to James’s ‘archive’ collection, which comprises genuine vintage pieces from across almost half a century.
But most items have two prices – the higher for when you’re buying a single piece, or if you’re buying in bulk with a minimum spend of £200 you trigger the lower rate.
But this relatively new venture offers James a way to keep his hand in an industry that he loves – he used to have a hangar filled with more than 100,000 kilos of vintage clothing near Stansted Airport before selling off his inventory and downsizing.
“I’m just having a bit of fun with it,” says James. “I would personally like to carry it on forever, but I need someone to come in with me and run it for me. I still want to be part of the creative process of buying and selling clothes, even though the market is saturated – it’s a good product, it’s a good industry, because of its ethics.”
James moved to Margate eight years ago to escape London house and retail rent prices while also falling in love with the beach, the town and his spot in Arlington House.
With his brand Mint Vintage, James had retail stores in Camden, Covent Garden, Seven Dials and eventually Stoke Newington before giving up his high street position.
“I always went wholesale to retail and then back again as a career,” he says. “In wholesale, you’ve got a broad range of customers who’ve all got different ideas about what they want to sell – then you can buy broader and it becomes a bit more interesting.”
Being from a family of market traders in the north, James headed to London to achieve a dream of having a stall at the legendary Portobello Road Market, “which is still arguably the best market in the world”.
“I had someone give me an order of 200 units of 80s jewelry and I subsequently found the jewellery with a lot of sunglasses, which I then sold to Urban Outfitters. And that got me going on wholesale,” he says.
At different times, James has travelled the world to intercept quality secondhand clothing that would otherwise make its way to Africa and South America in bales to be sorted and sold.
“Effectively, they haven’t made a machine to separate clothes yet. You have to do it with a human hand and a human eye that separates the fabrics and the shapes, whether it’s men’s or women’s trousers, polycotton trousers or wool trousers, or whatever.”
His knowledge of the fashion cycles has seen him hit trends across the years, while his eye for a garment has been appreciated by the designers of some of the world’s biggest fashion houses.
“The whole industry of fashion relies on plagiarism,” he says. “Everybody copies everything in terms of design. I’ve worked with a guy, he’s one of the most formidable menswear designers ever, at Celine, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior Homme. He used to buy a lot of clothes off me – maybe 20 or 30 asymmetric biker jackets and then maybe, say, 20 to 30 suede fringe jackets – and his next collection was an amalgamation of all the ones he bought off me.
“I remember the Dolce & Gabbana guys coming in and taking 100 stretchy belts from the 80s off the wall. They’re just going to copy them, you know.”
While vintage stores from around the South East and beyond will know James from his wholesale days, he has also become well known for having enough of the right items for TV and film productions to take advantage of and has recently supplied garments for the likes of Netflix’s Black Mirror.
There is a genuine joy when people find a vintage garment they love. There is a buzz to interacting with the clothes and going to the effort of searching and to be rewarded when they find the right piece. For James, it’s been a life-long passion of taking one person’s cast-off and allowing it to become another person’s favourite.
“More people in the world are saying they’ll never buy new clothing ever again,” he says. “And there’s enough clothes in this world for people not to buy new ever again.
“There’s more jeans in the world than there are people now. Yeah, that’s the facts.”
The Yacht Club
Unit 14a Westwood Business Park, CT9 4JJ
Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 10am-5pm.
